"To be crossing into new territory on both edges of the heliosphere at the same time to within a day - you couldn't plan that if you wanted to," Justin Kasper, an astrophysicist at the University of Michigan and principal investigator for the Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons, or SWEAP, instrument on the Parker Solar Probe, told Space.com here during the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, where both missions' accomplishments were conversation starters.

As a human, Kasper loved the coincidence, although as an astrophysicist he does have one small worry. "I am not going to be able to keep up with writing these papers," he said.

The differences between the two missions are staggering. They launched 41 years apart. Where Voyager 2 has enjoyed a leisurely stroll among the outer planets and beyond, the Parker Solar Probe made a mad dash to the center of our solar system in just three months. It would take nearly a quarter-million copies of the Voyager 2 computer to equal the memory of the smartphone in the pocket of a Parker Solar Probe engineer. When the Voyagers launched, bell-bottoms were hip - and they're back on the runways for Parker's first winter in orbit.

Both spacecraft are equipped with similar instruments for measuring plasma particles. That's no coincidence: Kasper was inspired in his SWEAP design by the very instruments that flew on the twin Voyager probes, which were built by his graduate-school mentors. Voyager 2 carries four larger Faraday cups all told, with three pointed at slightly different angles toward the sun; whereas Parker carries just one much smaller cup designed to sip the sun's plasma flood.

Voyager 1's Faraday suite stopped working decades before it entered interstellar space, leaving scientists to wait an extra six years for data of this type. On Nov. 5, it finally came, when Voyager 2's version of the instrument recorded the disappearance of plasma about 120 astronomical units (AU) away from the sun. (Earth is on average one AU away from the sun.)

That plasma disappearance marks the heliopause, where the solar wind - a constant stream of plasma particles flowing off the sun - collides against the superfast particles called cosmic rays that make up the interstellar wind. The resulting heliopause is a bubble that inflates and contracts over the course of the sun's cycle.

Parker Solar Probe's job is to investigate the source of that solar wind within the sun's ultrahot atmosphere, called the corona. It will do so for seven years in order to capture data at different stages of the solar cycle, making a total of 24 planned solar flybys to inch ever closer to our star. And so, on Nov. 5 at 10:28 p.m. EST (0328 GMT Nov. 6), it and its Faraday cup grazed less than one-fifth of an AU above the sun's visible surface.

And just like that, in less time than it takes humanity's home world to twirl once within the vastness of the cosmos, two of our creations brushed opposite ends of the bubble surrounding our celestial neighborhood and our fingers stretched a tiny bit deeper into the heavens.

Reader Comments

" the solar wind - a constant stream of plasma particles flowing off the sun - collides against the superfast particles called cosmic rays that make up the interstellar wind. "

This writing above is typical of the art of NOT acknowledging electric circuitry or connection, and is a systemic bias in the mind of science reporting. The human mind is predicated upon separation. and only communicates to maintain the separation as a model or construct of definition and control.

The divine human is an emanation of an already or always communion - as a relational awareness of embrace. This can be likened to a 'field' phenomena, in that a pervasive condition embraces all its relational facets within one unified field. There is only one thing going on - experiencing itself in infinite facets of relation of perspective.

Magnetic events often called anomalies that register 'surprise' are pervasive in galactic and solar and geo science, but magnetic is an attribute of electric. They are inseparable.

The nature of the electric force in biology and cosmology is intricate and complex in its working, but simple in its underlying principle. Plasma - as the fourth state of matter - is itself curiously named after blood - because it behaves so like to a living system. Yet there is more than a similarity for the blood is electrically alive as a helical flow of vortical communication - and the electrical nature intracellular and extra cellular communication is of an order of organising structure of totality in or through all its parts - curiously supporting the experience of a separate-self sense as a consciousness of seeming opposition or refusal of 'what is'.

A plasmasphere effects a double sheathed containment or boundaried field of insulation from, but not actual separation from its greater environment. However, in our 'human structural mind' we can not only generate a private playground, but a prison planet.

My sense of the synchronicity in the article above is of a reconnection in conscious awareness of communioned being - as an embracing field of inclusion of polarity instead of the lost identity within the polarised realm of action and reaction.

Was Parker the 'discoverer' of 'cosmic rays'? I doubt that very much. I am thinking Birkeland was one of the first. But my sense of the release of the old model is of one of 'damage limitation' in relation to the World-ego - as the attempt to save face - but also the conditions in which to re-evaluate.

"In 1913, Birkeland may have been the first to predict that plasma was ubiquitous in space. He wrote: "It seems to be a natural consequence of our points of view to assume that the whole of space is filled with electrons and flying electric ions of all kinds. We have assumed that each stellar system in evolutions throws off electric corpuscles into space. It does not seem unreasonable therefore to think that the greater part of the material masses in the universe is found, not in the solar systems or nebulae, but in "empty" space. In 1916, Birkeland was probably the first person to successful predict that the solar wind behaves as do all charged particles in an electric field, "From a physical point of view it is most probable that these new solar rays are neither exclusively negative nor positive rays, but of both kinds"; in other words, the Solar Wind consists of both negative electrons and positive ions."

excerpted from www.plasma-universe.com/Kristian_Birkeland

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This view is - I feel corroborated by discovery since - and founds the idea that 99+% of the Universe is Plasma - not dark matter fudge for saving face. So instead of using 'empty space' to feel insignificant, we can release such arrogant and ignorant inverted grandiosity, and accept both our true Embrace and the alignment of our true being in the Grandeur of Creation.

Functional communication gives and receives as one.

The intent to block or undermine and control communication can only seem meaningful within the conditions of its own belief - which is to say within the seeming dynamic of conflict - or reactive causation that assigns cause to falsely flagged effects, so as to persist in the emulation of the idea of power over.

The thunderbolt was seen as cosmic attack, but is no less attracted and drawn than 'moved' by a projective will.

The masculine and feminine archetype there is of a hidden, ignored, denied and subjected Feminine Mater or Matrix. But without the 'attractor' of the Feminine the Masculine is 'impotent' and so to hold the role of the face of power must capture and mask its dependency in forms or postures of power that it needs to be supported in.

This of course opens a world of extension and qualification to the ' Yin and Yang' of polarity expression. But I was obviously moved to expand the subject of Electric Universe to human consciousness.

Is consciousness itself an electrical phenomena?

The idea of something arising from nothing is predicated in the idea of 'empty space' as nothing - and therefore NOT the way to approach thinking on this. Rather, consider a relational expression of a One that has not self-referencing in and of itself alone but ONLY through the extension of relation. Or to state differently is never in and of itself alone but always the extension of Creation AS the one in all its 'parts'. Relationship is not of separated things but of relational being. Human consciousness to date - at least in the current epoch - is of the reversal and denial of the first and the last or true Cause to Effect - as the experience of an unfolding time and space to its phase shift of involution - which is not regressive but the rediscovering of who and what we are - within the dream of awakening - rather than the dream of becoming powers to ourself in roles of victor - or victim in subjection to its own idea.

Our Sun is looking through the window of the room in which I write - as through these eyes.

And your efforts are beneficial, (IMO), to those who will spend the time align their train of thoughts with your words..

Good job.

R.C.

P.s., Right now, to my right, is a "Quantum Quirk"* image of a thickly furred feline, (Maine Coon? European Forest Cat?) hustling - nay, hauling ass! down a snow trail,

and it's beautiful! Talk about catching 'motion in action in a 'freeze** frame'; one would be hard pressed to find a better photo. (Now is 12/17/18, Mon. at 6.38 a.m., E.S.T.)

* Which I believe, but am not certain, that about 40% of those pictures were taken by Ark, LKJ's Physicist H, as I recall, while the rest, I presume are chosen by Ark/LKJ, but that's purely a guess.

As I've noted before, I believe this site should allow comments on each and all of Ark's Quarks... oops, I mean Quantum Quirks, as they would allow each and all of us to "lighten up" better than any article under that category, infra.

Interestingly, Voyager 2 was launched before Voyager/Voyager 1" -and I have space memorabilia re those launches, as my father was on the U.T.C. (Sub. of U.A.) team in charge of the Titan Solid Rocket Motors or Boosters (SRMs or SRBs) which, I believe, launched both I and 2. (I have a Voyager belt buckle. It was for #1; but at that time, they weren't certain that a #2 would happen or not, so it just says, 'Voyager'.)

As I once noted on here (I believe when Voyager 1 left our solar system - and it's still the farthest manmade object - that we proles are aware of - ever sent out.)* I here repeat. Yes, my Father scratched, with his pen knife, I and my siblings' initials into one of the sundry steel girders/support structures, on the SRBs/SRMs, as likewise did his coworkers. I presume it was one of the lowest rings that burn out first, but never asked him. (RIP)